Injuries starting to pile up, and the racing season hasn’t begun
KASILOF, Alaska, Nov. 15, 2006 — Jason Mackey sat in the passenger seat of Bruce Linton’s dog truck and had a chance to fling the door open and jump as the heavy vehicle slid toward a steep bluff, but he didn’t bail, mainly because they were going so slow and he figured the truck would stop. It didn’t.
Like a bad dream, the wreck unfolded in slow motion on the sharp, icy right button-hook turn around the lip of a steep gully down to Coyote Creek. Locals call the spot “Deadman’s Curve.” The two dog mushers on their way to the only useable snow in the region were packing 20 dogs, two sleds and supplies for a short training run. Linton turned the wheel but the truck kept sliding toward the lip of the canyon until the truck tilted left over the edge and began a series of cartwheels, flinging and crushing the sleds, smashing the wooden dog box built on the truck’s frame and imploding the cab against the two men.
Considering the obvious damage to the truck from banging through alders, aspen and spruce trees in its path, everyone escaped remarkably well. The only serious casualty from the accident was Mackey, who suffered three broken ribs and a torn hamstring in his right leg. His pancreas got jostled pretty hard, but doctors say internally he’ll be fine.
And the 20 dogs? Just one swollen toe on one of Mackey’s dogs. A few rattled and frightened dogs that got loose in the wreckage were safely gathered up within a day.
The wreck on Nov. 7 has been bad enough news to merit a story, but that accident is just a symptom of poor weather conditions that, once again, have Alaskan dog mushers scrambling and sometimes taking desperate risks to get their canines in shape to race by mid-December.
“It’s horrible,” Mackey said, summing up the training conditions. “The trails in the hills, yes, it’s doable, but it is dangerous. For one, on the downhills, it ain’t smart to be running a big team. You can’t hook down. I don’t care what kind of snowhook you’ve got; you can’t hook down right now. It’s marginal.”
Linton’s lost truck and Mackey’s injuries are but two prominent examples of the physical toll from thin snow this year.
Paul Gebhardt, Linton and Mackey’s neighbor in Kasilof, strained his stomach muscles and banged up his head a few days later on the back of a sled, trying to control a string of 15 dogs clattering along through maybe 6 inches of powdery snow. The wounded Gebhardt then resorted to an ATV near his home at sea level, only to smash the front wheel of his four-wheeler as it careened over frozen rutted ground and bounced into a stump. He is now playing it a lot safer, hooking 15 dogs at a time to his three-quarter ton truck and having them pull the truck in low gear down a remote, unplowed road in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. It was 17 below outside on Tuesday morning, and Gebhardt sat in the cab eating potato chips and drinking a soda as his dogs ran 31 miles. His neighbor, 1984 champ Dean Osmar, was on the way to make the same run with his dog truck.
Trailer hitch caps knee, ends Hessert’s season
Elsewhere in the state, John T. Hessert, an Iditarod veteran who signed up for his rookie Yukon Quest this year, crushed one of his knees beneath the hitch of a heavy trailer holding his dog box.
Hessert is in bad shape. Living in his truck near Fairbanks with no home, kennel partner or handler, he’s out of commission for the season and hoping to farm out his entire kennel of racing dogs for the winter.
“It is a little frustrating looking at Jeff (King) and his staff of 10, putting dogs in an altitude tent while I am hobbling around on crutches with it 25 below trying to coax people into helping me feed my dogs while sleeping in my truck at night with my leg in a cast,” Hessert wrote in an e-mail. But Hessert aims to learn from his physical, and psychological, misfortunes. He’s already planning for 2008. “I have been reading and thinking a lot about people like Lance Armstrong and Picabo Street,” he wrote. “I honestly believe that the seed of success is failure. You have to do well to establish confidence, but to have things go wrong in life makes you work harder, makes you want it more.”
Hessert was moving his gear from his training area at the top of Murphy Dome to the nearby mushing community of Two Rivers. A borrowed trailer popped off the ball on his truck. He backed up and went to re-attach the trailer, and picked up the tongue between his legs. When he pulled up and forward to try to get it back on, his left leg slipped on ice underneath the tongue of the trailer and, “I dropped the tongue on the inside of my left knee, dislocating the kneecap. It looks like I will probably need reconstructive surgery on the ligaments in the left knee.”
It’s 30 below in Fairbanks, not a place to be hobbling around on crutches trying to get help with a homeless kennel of sled dogs. Hessert has been living the gypsy life for a couple of years like that, putting together a real nice team, but he finally realized he was putting the figurative cart before the horse. “This accident exposed a lot of glaring weaknesses in my plan to build a top distance team: I had no infrastructure to fall back on,” he said.
Next year? He’s already dreaming. He hopes to establish a kennel “somewhere warmer than Fairbanks.” Montana perhaps. And he wants to team up with his brother and have multiple competitive teams in the Wyoming Stage Stop, and then run a young squad in the Iditarod.
It’s bad all over
In some cases, mushers from Fairbanks to the Kenai Peninsula are still using ATVs, snowmobiles and trucks instead of sleds because the snow depth in November is too scant for sleds to be safe. In other cases, they’ve switched to sleds and taken the risks associated with banging around on frozen grass, dirt and tundra topped with a few inches of powder. In what has become an annual rite in the past five years or so, mushers are loading up their trucks and heading wherever they can find decent conditions. Mackey said his brother, two-time Quest champion Lance, was still using a four-wheeler at his new home outside Fairbanks around Murphy Dome. Similar reports were coming in from other areas.
Meanwhile, November is a time of year when distance mushers are seriously ramping up their mileage. Jeff King may have been doing 50-plus miles by October, but most of the rest are trying to reach those sorts of numbers by mid- to late November. Without much snow to run on, the experience can be brutal.
In my area, the Kenai Peninsula, several mushers and their handlers have been banged up and bruised already. I’ve been fortunate. I train on the same trails that wrenched Gebhardt’s stomach muscles, and I plan to keep running up there with smaller numbers of dogs than Gebhardt was using. I was on my way back from one of those trips, training with Tim Osmar, who lives in the hills, when Osmar got a call from his wife on his cell phone about Linton’s wreck. I drove out and marveled at the damage. Linton was staring from the edge of the road down a couple hundred feet where his battered white pickup lay in tatters. I could only offer him half my PB&J sandwich, a bottle of water and some verbal support.
Linton hasn’t stopped training. He’s using a pickup truck with airline dog kennels to haul eight dogs at a time into the hills. But with 28 dogs to prepare for his first ever Iditarod, Linton is feeling the pain mentally, if not physically. “Mainly, I’m just happy to be alive,” he told me. “I’m still positive and optimistic I still have a shot at Iditarod.”
Jason Mackey, who took a pummeling physically, was out only three short days before feeling compelled to get back out with the dogs, despite a gimpy leg and broken ribs. (He must be a Mackey. His brother, Lance, bounced back from major cancer surgery and even had a surgeon saw off one of his fingers because it was giving him too much pain when he trained his dogs.) Jason will be using an ATV, rather than a sled, which is safer for his bum leg while it heals.
“I’m a little beat up, but like I just told my wife, I feel pretty good today,” Mackey said. “I’m able to lift 5-gallon buckets and stuff. I did it earlier, too, but I was not very smart to be doing it.”
Mackey is still gunning to win the Sheep Mountain 150 in mid-December, and hopes the hamstring will recover in a month. The damage is in his right leg, which he uses for pedaling - pushing off with it in the snow like a skateboarder pumping down a paved street.
He has arranged a hasty fund-raiser at a Kasilof bar called The Decanter, where he hopes to raise enough money - not for medical expenses, but simply for a new sled. (He must be a Mackey.) His sled was reduced to kindling by the accident and he can’t race without a new one. (For the record, Mackey’s medical needs are being met by Linton’s auto insurance.)
Like Linton, Mackey viewed the truck wreck as a little hint to savor life. “A week ago Monday I didn’t know if I was going to be alive,” he said. “It sure opened my eyes to take each day and have fun. As mushers, we get grumpy and stressed about bad trail and snow conditions, but y’know, now I’m not stressing out about it.”